News Headlines
- Sat, May 18
- Assassin's Creed movie, starring Michael Fassbender, coming to theaters Memorial Day 2015
- Fri, May 17
- Dust: An Elysian Tail hitting PC May 24, the Blade of Ahrah and the power it controls awaits
- PC port of Metal Gear Rising: Revengeance confirmed, no release date given
- The Wonderful 101's not so wonderful release date announced, pushed to September 15
- Trion Worlds, developer for MMOs RIFT and Defiance, suffers heavy layoffs
New Articles
Related Articles
Box
On the front of the XFX 9800 GX2's box, we have a machine nine. It looks almost like a bomb of sorts.
The back of the box boasts performance gainst of up to 50% above a 8800 Ultra. The benchmarks will have to see if this is accurate.
Bundle
The XFX 9800 GX2 comes with 2 DVI/VGA adapters, a driver CD, a full version of the excellent RTS Company of Heroes, a molex-to-PCIe adapter, a 'Do Not Disturb' placard, a manual, a quick installation guide, and a S/PDIF cable.
All in all, a complete bundle.
This would also be a good place to mention that this 9800 GX2 is protected by XFX's Double Lifetime Warranty, which lasts for the life of your card, and also covers a second owner, if you ever choose to sell it. Remember to register your XFX card within 30 days to be eligible for this warranty.
Overclocking
Using RivaTuner, we tried to find out what this 9800 GX2 was capable of, following that age-old adage that an extremely powerful video card is good, but an overclocked extremely powerful video card is even better.
Setting the fan to 100% we began our overclocking adventure.
The stock clocks for the XFX 9800GX2 are 600, 1500, 2000 (core, shader, memory, in MHz.) As it turned out, the XFX 9800 GX2 had a lot more to offer than we expected, in the overclocking department. After a bit of experimentation, we had success sustaining benchmarks at clock settings of 703 / 1786 / 2308 -- which wasn't all that bad at all. That's a roughly 16% overclock across the board. For comparison, our EAH3870X2 we tested overclocked around the 5% mark.
Two important things to note about this overclocking, however: first off, the fan is pretty loud at 100%, and you'd probably not want your video card this loud all the time; and second, while the video card never crashed, there was brief flashes of darkness every once in a while during Crysis, indicating these clock speeds were a bit close too the edge and might not be healthy for your card to sustain, with standard cooling methods.
Watching the benchmarks fly-by at these overclocked speeds was a pleasure. Let me tell you: overclocked by about 16%, this card was fast.
Really, really, really fast.
Article Index
|
|
Most people would be very satisfied with their framerates in pretty much any game with any card that is around $200 bucks right now, such as a 8800 gt.
For Crysis, you might want to look at this article I wrote which looks at CPU speeds and their affects on games:
http://www.neoseeker.com/Articles/Hardware/Guides/cpu_bottlenecks/
Just a quick thing to add: going from 2 cores to 4 cores will really not improve your gaming experiences all that much. Hardly any games currently can make much use of 4 cores.
$600 is a bit much, for sure.
I'm guessing though that in as little as a month and half this card will be about $490 mark or so, making it slightly more enticing. I also think that this card will stack up well against the coming 9800 GT and GTX models. However: of course both the 9800 GT and GTX will almost certainly be much better deals, price-per-performance wise. This card is pretty much just for those people out there that have a bit of cash, and want to make a insano-gaming machine.
BTW, wish I could have thrown some SLI numbers in there for you guys. But due to untimely hardware failure, it was either going with a CrossFireX setup or a SLI setup, and I thought it'd be need to compare this card to 3 HD3870's.